When the Stars are Right
by ultharkitty
Summary: G1. The Prime is dead, Cybertron is overrun; all that stands between our universe and oblivion is HIM GRIMLOCK! Warning for MAJOR CHARACTER DEATHS, gore and violence. 4 parts total.
1. Grimlock's Last Stand

Me Grimlock tell you, today are last day of war. The final battle are over. Me Grimlock record this so others know, in future when me Grimlock body found and recordy thing what him Perceptor install are activated.

Me Grimlock are not all in one piece. Diagnostics say me have two breems until me Grimlock turn to grey. Me Grimlock use this time in wise way, like him Optimus would.

Me tell you how it end. Me tell you what me Grimlock see, in final battle.

This are us Dinobots. Us are best of Autobot warriors. Us fighters!

Us Dinobots strong. Me Grimlock stand on precipice. Look at Dinobots on metal plain before Iacon. Them fight hard, tooth and claw, and me Grimlock proud. Them breath fire and shoot bullets. Them crack open the ground, and smash them foes to tiny little pieces.

And me Grimlock do same. Me king, me protector. Me stand for others who cannot, who am hiding or who am dying. Me try to save them.

Us Dinobots strong, but enemy stronger.

Me Grimlock stand as long as me can, but after long and valiant battle me Grimlock fall. Enemy are strongest what us Dinobots ever fight. Them are stronger than Trypticon, stronger than Tornadron, them are stronger than Unicron and made of all things what us Dinobots cannot see, as well as things what us can. And them are made of glass and metal and smoke and flesh, and things what us Dinobots cannot touch, but us can feel.

That me Grimlock fall to them are no reason for me to feel shame.

It are only shame that me Grimlock could not save them who are smaller and weaker than us Dinobots before me fall.

Me Grimlock lay on side, where me am now. Me watch from precipice as other Dinobots also fall. Them are grey now, like him Wheeljack in Autobot City. Like him Ironhide and him Prowl and him Ratchet in shuttle. Like him Rodimus in chamber with Vector Sigma main console. Like him Perceptor in control room of space bridge.

It were only her Marissa who did not go grey.

Her Marissa were in gun emplacement. Not jet, as her like the most, but on the ground, beside me Grimlock on precipice. Her were in tower, her face all screwed up like her are angriest and mightiest human what ever lived! But her Marissa also make tears what stream from her eyes and chin. Her do this while her Marissa fire guns what are bigger even than us Dinobots. Guns what were made by him Shockwave long before us Dinobots were created. Guns what were made for defence of Cybertron.

Her Marissa use them guns to protect us Dinobots. Just as us Dinobots use us strength and might to protect her Marissa.

But me Grimlock could not stop them all. Them darkness flow and clatter and flap, and me Grimlock bite them and hit them with tail, and me sear them with flame, but it are no good. Them are too strong, and too many, and them get past me Grimlock.

Her Marissa not turn to grey like her Arcee when things reach her. Her Marissa turn to red, and me Grimlock roar with loudest voice ever heard on Cybertron.

Me Grimlock shout into darkness: me Grimlock not go quietly into night! Me Grimlock smash you! Me Grimlock tear you to pieces! You not kill mighty human what are so strong even though she so small!

But me Grimlock fall. Me lay here, where you find me. Me broken and grey, but you not be broken and grey. Me Grimlock know it are not matter any more if you are Autobot or Decepticon. Me Grimlock know it only matter what him Perceptor say before him colours drain away.

Find last source of energon. Use energon to power core of Cybertron and turn on machine to bring stars back to proper places. Him Perceptor say that stars are wrong. Him say that this bring about thing him call 'fundamental shift in physical laws'. Him Perceptor say it let in things what are bad. Things what are not meant to be real.

Me Grimlock say you find energon.

This are last command of mightiest of Autobot leaders. You have to do what me Grimlock say.

Find energon. Save universe.

It are up to you now.


	2. Swindle on the Run

Oh frag no, frag no, not low on fuel, he couldn't be low on fuel. Swindle's intakes heaved, his tires burned. Everything was sharper than usual, clearer, brighter, as though a billion tiny shards of glass glittered from each and every surface.

Were they following? Surely they couldn't be? He avoided his mirrors, he didn't want to know. Driving, that was all that mattered, pedal to the metal, eating the miles. Oh Sigma what the scrap was he going to do?

Flee, that was it. Flee, and maybe fly if he could find someone big enough to take him. or a transport, that'd be great. A non-sentient transport, one of those huge hulking things Octane liked to pilot when he'd stolen something too big to carry by himself.

OK, so, he had to find a transport, which meant he had to find a hangar. Breaking in wouldn't be a problem. He had his scatter blaster, and a wonderful selection of lock picks and hacking devices.

_Go back._

No! Frag no! Not if the fate of the universe depended on it. Not for an emperor's ransom. Not for a diamond the size of Trypticon.

_Help them._

NO! he couldn't do that, wouldn't. He kept driving. His team mates were dead. He knew it, had seen it, felt it echoing at the end of the empty gestalt bond. Felt the programming reaching out for something that wasn't there, transmitting signals that were never received. Could never be received.

He didn't see the edge until he was almost over it. He spun, hitting a ridge, his momentum tipping him, flinging him out into the air. He transformed, screaming, clutching for anything as he fought to activate his thrusters. They kicked in, too harsh, and he toppled aft over head back onto the edge. His helm hit the ground, his vision blacking for one terrifying moment. It was them, it had to be! He grabbed for his gun, the ground, anything. His HUD flickered, patches of colour and light emerging through the crackling black.

OK, just a malfunction, visuals rebooting. He vented hard, his every cable trembling, hands shaking as he scrambled to his knees, propping the scatter blaster on his shoulder. He reached for the trigger, squeezing gently.

There was nothing there. Nothing moving anyway. Nothing alive.

Just a field of grey, jagged and broken. Metal; a foot, a tail. An insignia, Autobot, no longer red. The red was elsewhere, in smears and streaks, not gleaming, but drying to brown over steel and glass. Humans and Dinobots, all dead.

"Oh frag." He tried to control his venting, to get a lid on his fear. "Oh frag, oh frag." He stood, approached the edge. It was the same below. Energon and oil and the mess of dead organics, all overlaid with a glistening patina, slowly eating them away.

He's seen the same with Brawl. The flap of caterpillar treads as the hiss of corroded metal filled his audials. Then the shouting and the screaming and the anger flying after him along the gestalt bond as he fled as fast as his wheels could carry him.

Then nothing. Just the roar of the wind and the rumble of the broken road beneath his tires.

_You left them to die._

No! He shook his head, trying to dislodge the thought. It hadn't been like that.

Brawl had been the last of them. One lone light glimmering, a final flare of agony-frustration-fury. Then he too had guttered and Swindle was left alone.

He took a shaky step forward, scanning all the time. Then another. No hint of smoky tendrils, no insubstantial alien fronds reaching for him like they'd reached for Brawl through the crack in the walls, and gripped him and pulled him and no, he mustn't think of that. Had to keep on track. On track, yeah, that's it! Follow the track, back to Iacon. Find a freighter, some big dumb drone. Find some energon. Get the slag off Cybertron.

"Gah!" He flinched as his foot snagged on something, his scatter blaster discharging a single violet shot into the star-spun sky. He froze, audials straining, and it was only by a force of will that he managed to get his foot back on the ground.

He looked down. Grey and pink. A long curve, tapering, a tail, a belly, clawed feet pointing up. Jaws that had once crushed seekers hung slack, the roof of a cavernous mouth blackened with soot.

Grimlock, colourless as the rest of them, dead as the human sprawled in pieces over the ground nearby.

But whole.

The low fuel warning pinged again just as a gust of wind carried a distant high wailing.

_Them_.

He was on his knees, his scatter blaster by his feet, his hands clasping for the dead Dinobot's fuel hatch before he really knew what he was doing. He needed fuel, it didn't matter where it came from. Metal was metal, he told himself. Energon was energon, and Grimlock was gone. It wasn't disgusting, it wasn't enough to make him want to purge his tanks. It was essential. It was the key to his survival. He was a survivor. And slag, but he was going to get out of this.

Quivering and uncoordinated, he managed to tear out some cabling, got a siphon going. Straight into his fuel tank; he wasn't taking this orally. He could hardly bear to look. They hadn't even done this on Charr, when they were starving. When his team mates had been with him, alive and snarky and violent.

Couldn't think of that. He needed to focus. Listen to the wind, calculate how far away those things were, how long it would take for them to get to him. Which was the best direction to run.

His grip slipped, and the fuel sputtered. It speckled his paintwork, pink on yellow. He stared, watching the spilled drops dribble, while his chronometer ticked away the astroseconds. He should move, he knew it. He needed to go. Now. _Right_ now.

A new noise cut through the sigh of the breeze, and Swindle almost ran. But it wasn't them, not this time. It was something else. Something to do with Grimlock's chest. A small click as a panel slid aside, a dull glow of circuits still alive with electricity while everything else around them was dead as the ground beneath his feet.

He dropped the hose, energon spurting for a moment until the siphon failed.

A tiny hologram sprang up, inert image of the Dinobot's head. Three-dimensional, but immobile, a placeholder. Then his voice, gruff as rust, urgent and altogether too loud on the wind-whipped battlefield.

"Me Grimlock tell you, today are last day of war. The final battle are over. Me Grimlock…"

Swindle leapt on the equipment, pressing buttons at random. He couldn't be found, not now, not because some stupid Autobot had left a memorial for people who would never come after him.

"…record this so others know, in future when me Grimlock bodyyy fouuuun…" The voice died, the hologram sparking to nothing. Swindle snapped the cover back on his auxiliary fuel intake, and snatched up his gun.

Glancing back at the tiny dancing lights, it occurred to him that, when all this was over, this kind of momento would fetch an absolute fortune on the open market. The last words of the mighty Grimlock. He pried out the recording device and secured it in a compartment on his arm.

Straightening, he took in the terrain. The next gust of wind never reached his audials. He'd already transformed and was speeding along the road to Iacon.


	3. Blurr and Wheelie waiting for the end

In the middle of a dirty floor, in a cluttered, filthy room, Blurr lay curled around the Matrix of Leadership. It was warm, a glimmer of light escaping to play across his armour. He watched it, tense, not resting. How could he possibly rest?

In the corner, Wheelie huddled, a pistol on his knees, his catapult forgotten. He looked up as Blurr stirred. When he spoke, there was none of his former cheer.

"Wheelie wants to know, how much left to go?"

Blurr shrugged, clinging to the meagre heat. "I don't know, I mean I do know, but I don't really want to think about it because we don't have much left, but really? You really want to know because I'll tell you, but I'm not sure you really do want to know."

Slowly, Wheelie nodded. He glanced at the door, and winced as it shuddered. Blurr shivered, but the shelving wedged against it held.

"All right," Blurr began. "We've got three cubes of high grade, nineteen cubes of mid grade, a crate of standard grade and three and a half boxes of field rations like Kup used to like, and a box of rust sticks but I don't think we should eat those because they give you surges and they make me feel like I need to clean out the inside of my tank. I mean, what is it about food from Junkion? Maybe we should call it junk food; I don't know about you, but I think that'd work as a name, I mean it's kinda made from junk, but it's also a bit tasty and I know it's bad for me but I really want to eat some and I don't want to know what that sound was."

Wheelie shook his head, his lips pressed together. Evidently, he didn't want to know either.

The door shuddered anew, tiny particles of dust flying from the shelves. They fell slowly, illuminated by the dim glow of Blurr's headlights. It reminded him of snow back on Earth, and he curled himself more tightly around the Matrix.

"Matrix wouldn't want us to die," Wheelie said. "Maybe Blurr could give it a try?"

Blurr bit back a retort, his vocal processors hissing static. He couldn't use the Matrix, they'd been through this already. Blurr wasn't Prime material; he was a courier, that was all. He had speed on his side, but that wouldn't help him here. It hadn't helped Kup. Not as the wavering darkness stole into the gaps in his armour, not as it burst out of him again, chittering and callous and utterly unstoppable.

It hadn't helped Springer either. Or Chromia, or Bumblebee.

Each creature had been unique, each nightmarish variation composed of different matter to the next, each seemingly subject to a different set of physical laws.

Blurr had done all he could, but the things had been everywhere. Some went down to bullets, others to fire. But most didn't go down at all, and he'd run and run, bringing fuel, bringing munitions, heaving the injured to safety – or what he thought was safety – forming a diversion, trying to slow the creatures down.

In the end there'd been nothing else he could do. He'd grabbed Wheelie and fled, running as fast as the increased drag would allow him, heading down tunnel after tunnel until the pipes spat them out in a great well of darkness. And at its heart, a spark.

Blurr had turned his headlights on, and wished that he hadn't.

Vector Sigma no longer glowed, its databanks cracked and smoking, it's fragile filigree of crystalline strands lay broken. And slouched nearby, on his back over the main console, Rodimus Prime, as grey as Chromia and Kup and Springer.

It was a split-microsecond decision. Blurr didn't remember doing it, but Wheelie had watched him, Wheelie had remembered and told him all about it later. In a flash, he'd gone to Rodimus, had dug out that one remaining spark, had pulled the Matrix from the Prime's cooling chest.

He hadn't paused. Instead, he'd fled, the Matrix in one hand, Wheelie's arm in the other. He'd run until his fuel light flashed, until Wheelie slumped and shuddered, unable to go on. They'd barricaded themselves in the first secure room they'd found; the command hub for Iacon's space port. Two Autobots and the Matrix. Maybe the only two Autobots left in the universe.

Blurr hoped someone would come. Grimlock or Ultra Magnus. Someone who knew what they were doing.

But there was only the muted thumping, the thuds that grew more urgent as the astroseconds passed. Thuds that turned into a scraping and scrabbling. That might, once, have sounded like a muffled kind of plea.

He kept expecting a slender tendril of wispy darkness to slip under the door, but nothing came.

What if they were wrong? What if it was a real person out there, banging on the door, trying to get in? A real person who needed their help.

Blurr looked at the Matrix. If only it would tell him what to do.

Another thud against the door, then silence. Only it wasn't, not really. Blurr held up a hand, gesturing Wheelie to stay still, stay silent. An echo of a voice again, and Blurr strained to hear.

"Lemme the frag in!"

Blurr froze. Wheelie's optics widened, brightening in the shadow of his cowl. Whatever else was said was lost, muffled by the layers of steel, but those words, quiet as they were, had been clear enough.

Blurr launched himself at the door, shoving the shelving with his shoulder, the Matrix cradled against his chest. Wheelie leapt to help. He grabbed the handle, wrestled with the lock.

It wasn't until the door cracked open that Blurr realised the noises had stopped.

"Bad to wait, we're too late." Wheelie sighed; his hands shook and his shoulders slumped. Blurr peered over his head.

Oh no, oh no no no no no, how had it come to this? He gripped Wheelie's arm, went to pull him back. But Wheelie was halfway into the corridor, wedging his foot under the grey metal chassis to turn it over.

Cracked purple glass stared up from a lifeless face. They should have let him in before. He'd been alive before. The optics dulled as Blurr watched, the frame seeming to ripple with an unnatural sheen. Blurr switched on his headlights, but even in the brighter illumination, he couldn't quite make it out. The only clear thing was the faction insignia. The dead mech hadn't been an Autobot.

"It's too late, bad to wait," Wheelie said. He glanced up at Blurr, then down in horror at his own foot. Something glistened on the toe he'd used to move the dead Decepticon.

"Get back in the room," Blurr said. "Get back in the room and we can close the door, and we can look at your foot. I think there's a field repair kit in here, and Ratchet once taught me how to make a dressing out of mesh and I'm sure we can get it off and you'll be fine, just get back in the room Wheelie, _please!_"

But Wheelie only shook his head. "You know, you have to go."

"No, I don't, I won't, I'm staying here with you!" The Decepticon's frame shimmered, and the words stalled in Blurr's vocaliser. The air behind Wheelie glimmered like knives.

Wheelie didn't turn. Instead, he offered up the smallest of smiles. "Good friend," he whispered, "to the end."

Blurr didn't have a chance to reply. The air erupted with a writhing mess of tendrils, and Wheelie's mouth opened in a silent scream. But all that emerged were more tendrils; tendrils and smoke and glass and a swift-spreading rash of corrosion like the worst cosmic rust Blurr had ever seen.

He couldn't let it touch him. The thought shocked him into action. If he touched the tendrils, if he touched Wheelie, it would all be over. He leapt past the corpse in the hallway, and it was only a last glance back at the greying frame of his friend that made him notice the object glimmering on the dusty floor, a finger's-breadth from the dead Decepticon's outstretched hand.

It pulsed with a faint, electric glow, and Blurr could have sworn he felt the Matrix grow fractionally hotter in his arms, then cooler again in time with the pulses.

Wheelie fell with a clatter, and Blurr dived for the object. He snatched it up and leapt back, spinning and launching himself into a sprint as the air churned behind him and the Decepticon's corroded frame collapsed in on itself with a sad little sound.

Blurr didn't want to hear Wheelie make that sound. He ran.


End file.
